Graceful

by Wendy Mass

  The corners of her mouth quiver and I can tell she’s trying not to smile. “It was YOUR great-great-great-grandfather who dammed up the river!”

  “Oh. You sure?”

  “Um, guys?” Rory says. “Can we focus, please?”

  “Sorry,” Amanda says.

  “Sorry,” Leo mutters.

  I take a deep breath and close my eyes. “Vortex of power,” I whisper to the rods. “Guide me to the vortex of power.”

  I open my eyes and in slow, measured steps begin to move forward. The rods sway gently back and forth along with my movements but don’t straighten out. I turn west and try again. They don’t begin to straighten out until I turn north.

  Leo begins to laugh. All the girls shush him.

  “Sorry!” he says. “It’s just that you’re facing the mall now. What if the vortex is inside the Gap! Or, wait, I bet it’s in the food court! The vortex could be inside Panda Pavilion!”

  “A panda would make a fine spirit animal,” Ray says cheerfully.

  “Hush!” Rory says. “The vortex isn’t in the food court!”

  “You’re probably right,” Leo says, turning serious. Then he blurts out, “I bet it’s in the underwear department at Macy’s!”

  This time, when Tara kicks, she doesn’t miss. Leo yelps.

  I’m sure the vortex is not in the mall, but still I’m relieved when I walk a few steps north and the rods swing to the right. I quickly turn east and walk forward. The rods immediately straighten out. I look like Frankenstein’s monster, with the rods sticking straight out in front of me like really skinny arms. The others shout and gather around.

  I take another deep breath, focus my thoughts again, and begin to walk. It only takes a minute before we enter the woods. There’s no path, but the trees, a mix of evergreen, birch, and elm, are wide enough apart that it’s easy to pass through them. The ground slopes gently upward, and we follow it.

  “Hey,” Leo says. “This is near where Amanda’s and my ancestors lived. When we went back in time and saw them as little kids, this was the direction they came from.”

  “And I think the road that leads to Angelina’s house is on the other side of these woods, too,” Tara says. “We’ve just never approached it from this side before.”

  “Sounds like a good place for a vortex to me!” Rory says.

  It’s beginning to feel like the dowsing rods are pulling me now instead of leading me. The tug gets stronger and stronger until I’m stumbling after them.

  “Anyone else notice the smell?” Amanda asks.

  The second she mentions it, the smell hits me and everyone else at the same time. Apples! This isn’t the usual the-air-smells-like-apples-when-magic-is-around kind of thing, this is for real. We look around as we continue hurling ourselves forward. There haven’t been apple trees here in decades. Where is the smell coming from?

  A minute later, we burst through the trees and stumble into a small clearing that I’d never have guessed was up here. The dowsing rods spread wide open, like they’re opening their arms to embrace a welcome guest. We have arrived.

  The six of us stand in a row and stare at the lone tree in the center of the clearing. The surprising part isn’t that it’s an apple tree, but rather that it’s got to be the strangest apple tree that ever existed anywhere on the planet. Ever.

  For one thing, its branches, which start about ten feet above the ground, don’t extend outward in all directions like you’d expect. Instead, they curl around the trunk, like the tree knows some big secret and is hugging itself to contain it.

  As twisted as the branches are, they are still dripping with apples. Ripe, red, full, juicy apples. The source of the smell, for sure. The power here thumps through the ground. I can actually feel it pulsing through me. I look at the others and know they feel it, too. Not as strongly as I do, but they feel it.

  “What do you do now?” Rory asks, resting her hand on my arm.

  The rods swing back to their neutral position. I kneel and rest them on a flat rock at my feet. “I’m not sure,” I admit. I hadn’t planned that far ahead.

  As I stand back up, I notice there are a lot of rocks around the size of my foot, most of them covered over with grass. I also spot an old stone bench on the outskirts of the clearing, mostly hidden by overgrown brush. I point at the ground. “What do you think the story is with these rocks? They don’t look like they were placed here randomly.”

  We begin kicking aside grass and dirt with our shoes, following different paths of rock. “It’s like a big circle,” Leo says.

  “Circles inside circles,” Tara adds. “But some of the stones are missing. There are big gaps.”

  I stop short. The pattern reminds me of something. I pull the pouch out of my back pocket and find Angelina’s first postcard. Greetings from … Stonehenge! shouts up at me.

  Stonehenge. It literally means stone circle.

  I flip the card over. The symbols of my friends swim before my eyes. One circle inside another, inside another. “It’s a labyrinth,” I announce. “And we’re supposed to rebuild it.”

  Standing here, in the shadow of the vortex, everyone can clearly see the writing on the card now. No one questions my conclusion.

  We fan out and run back into the woods to find more stones to match the others. Ray gets busy clearing off the stones that are already there. We start out very focused on our task, but then start getting silly. We dart in and out of one another’s paths, hiding behind trees and scaring one another when we pass. Tara has so many rocks in her arms I don’t know how she moves!

  Eventually we have enough and start filling in the gaps. Now that we can clearly see the old ones, it’s pretty easy to follow the circular lines. Whether on purpose or not, everyone leaves the innermost circle for me to fill in. I’m not sure they’re comfortable being so close to the vortex. Even I don’t want to get too close to the tree. What if it sucks me in and spins me around for all eternity? I shudder. From a few feet away I can see markings on the surprisingly smooth trunk. I can’t tell if they’re natural or man-made, but a closer inspection will have to wait.

  When we’re done, we step back to admire our handiwork.

  “We’ve got some serious labyrinth-building skills,” Leo says, wiping his hands together to dislodge the dirt. I’ve already wiped mine all over my clothes. Mom will be thrilled.

  “Totally!” Rory says. “We could make this our career! People would hire us from all over the —”

  But she doesn’t get to finish. At that moment, a wave of energy, stronger than the one I felt in the store last week, bursts out of the tree and knocks us all off our feet.

  “Is everyone all right?” Ray asks, crawling over. We groan and sit up. “Everyone say aye if you’re okay.”

  “Aye,” we each say in turn.

  “Aye aye, matey,” Leo says, doing his best pirate imitation.

  “That was crazy,” Tara says, rubbing her elbows. “What happened?”

  “I felt it once before,” I tell them. “Last Friday night in the store. It almost knocked me over then, too. But Tara and Ray didn’t feel anything.”

  “I felt it last Friday night, too,” Amanda says quietly. We all turn to look at her. “It was near the end of the gymnastics meet. So maybe around eight fifteen-ish?”

  “That’s when I felt the one in the store,” I tell her.

  “I figured I’d just imagined it,” Amanda says, “but then I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was different. And then on the way home is when I saw the watch store had gone. I’m sorry I didn’t say something sooner, about either of those things. It’s almost like I forgot it, like I dreamed it.”

  “I totally get it,” I assure her. “It’s like that for me sometimes, too.”

  She smiles at me gratefully.

  “But what was it?” Tara asks. “If the last wave can be connected with the things changing in the alley — which it definitely sounds like it was — then what happened this time? Is the entire alley g
one now?”

  None of us have an answer to that.

  “Look,” Rory says, pointing up at the sky. “Even Max and Flo felt it.”

  The two hawks are circling the vortex, one gliding behind the other. Flo lets out a high-pitched kreeee, Max makes a sound like garuuuunk. They make one more circle, then soar off in opposite directions. We turn our heads to follow Flo, then Max, then back to Flo as if we’re watching a tennis match. My heart starts pounding harder and harder the farther apart they get. Soon we can no longer spot their yellow feet against the blue sky.

  “I … I don’t understand,” Rory says, visibly shaken. “I’ve never seen those birds more than a few feet apart in my entire life.”

  “Me, neither,” Amanda and Leo echo.

  Max and Flo have been residents of Willow Falls since before any of us were born. I couldn’t believe it when, over the summer, Tara told me they were actually under a twenty-five-year-old love spell!

  “What does this mean?” Tara asks now. They all look to me for the answer.

  I close my eyes and try to let the threads of recent events knit together. My eyes snap open. “The magic in Willow Falls is unraveling!”

  “What??” the girls shout, grabbing my arms.

  “The vortex is undoing all the work Angelina did!” I tell them, beginning to pace in a circle. “Anything magical is slowly disappearing. Like the alley, we always knew there was something enchanted about it. I’ve never seen anyone besides us walk down it, have you guys?”

  They all shake their heads. Leo says, “David said he went into the watch store once with his grandfather when he was a little kid. I remember he said it smelled like feet.”

  “Why would a watch store smell like feet?” Ray asks.

  “He could have been confusing it with someplace else,” Leo says.

  “Either way,” I continue, “there was always something weird about that street and we’ve seen with our own eyes what’s been happening there. And now the spell that bound Max and Flo forever is broken! After being each other’s constant companions for a quarter of a century, they’re flying in different directions.”

  “Probably a bit relieved,” Ray says under his breath. Tara kicks him. Maybe she should try out for soccer instead of fencing.

  “It takes magic to undo magic,” Amanda says firmly. “Someone is undoing it.”

  In a house across town …

  Sylvia Johnston knew immediately that something was wrong. It wasn’t only the horrified stares of the women in her knitting circle, or the tingles across her cheeks and down her chin. She could actually see the shadows of the warts out of the corners of her eyes. Her eyes widened, her vision blurred, but she was not imagining it. After all these years, the warts the doctors had claimed were incurable were back.

  And they were angry.

  “Sylvia!” her oldest and dearest friend, Ruth Ann, shouted, clutching her ball of yarn to her chest. “Your face! Your beautiful face!”

  Sylvia jumped up, knocking her own yarn and half-made scarf onto the rug. She ran to the mirror to verify what she already knew. Angelina D’Angelo had cured her decades ago, asking nothing in return but her silence. She’d given it willingly and always made certain to look Angelina in the eye and smile when she passed her in town, while many others turned their heads away.

  Sylvia’s friends gathered around her, saying supportive things like “Don’t worry, you can hardly see them” and “With modern medicine you’ll be able to clear those right up” and “Milt’s eyes are so bad he won’t even notice them.” When Sylvia just continued to stare at her reflection, turning her face left and right, Lucille chimed in with “Vanity is a young woman’s folly. Who cares how you look on the outside?” But they all knew it wasn’t as simple as that.

  Sylvia plopped back down on the sofa while Ruth Ann hurried to call the pharmacist. Sylvia knew she wasn’t the only one Angelina had helped over the years, far from it. She closed her eyes and said a little prayer that her warts returning would keep the others from suffering a more serious reversal of fortune. Then she let Ruth Ann tie a scarf around her face and lead her to the door.

  “You don’t think Angelina’s behind the magic unraveling,” Tara asks, “do you?”

  I shake my head. “I think she still has some power left, even if she’s trying to hide it, but not nearly enough for something like this. Plus, she worked for a hundred years to protect this town, so no way is she going to undo all that.”

  “What about someone else?” Amanda asks.

  “No one else can use the vortex’s power,” I tell them, sure of it. “Only me, Angelina, and whoever came before her. And that person would have passed her powers to Angelina, like Angelina passed them to me. It’s in my DNA or something, so unless I have an unknown evil twin running around —”

  “That’s it!” Leo shouts.

  “Grace doesn’t have an evil twin!” Rory insists.

  “Not that,” Leo says. “What if someone took your DNA and can channel your powers that way? Like when you were in the hospital, did anyone take your blood?”

  My eyes widen. “Yes, they took a ton those first few days. My parents wanted them to test for everything they could think of. You don’t think someone stole it from the hospital, do you?”

  “Can you think of any other time someone could have taken blood?” Tara asks.

  “DNA is in your saliva, too,” Ray points out.

  “Did you spit on anyone recently?” Leo asks.

  The thought of me spitting on someone and them keeping it is so absurd, I actually laugh.

  Rory asks Tara if she can borrow her phone. “I’m going to call David,” she says. “Since he wants to be a doctor, he reads a lot of stuff about DNA.”

  He picks up right away, and she asks him how someone could get your DNA if they wanted it. “You’re with Connor and I don’t want to worry him,” she says in response to what was no doubt his questioning why she wanted to know. “I’ll tell you later, I promise.” She listens for a minute, then hangs up and hands Tara back the phone.

  “Well, apparently almost every cell in your body has DNA in it,” she reports. “You can get it from skin, blood, mucus, saliva, hair follicles, nails — hey, you didn’t get a manicure recently, did you?”

  My hand flies up to my head, to the spot where the hair came out with the glasses. The last thread weaves itself into place. I almost choke from trying to get the words out so fast. “It’s Connor! He yanked some hair out when he took my giant sunglasses to use for his invention. The follicles must have gotten embedded in there somewhere!”

  “That’s totally it!” Leo shouts. “Connor’s been looking through those glasses to test them out. I bet Tara’s uncle has used them, too, and David.”

  “But what’s he using them for?” I ask. “He still hasn’t told me.”

  “He’s making frames to attach to people’s glasses to watch 3-D movies more comfortably,” Tara says. “Family’s always the last to know, I guess!”

  “But how is that affecting the magic in town?” I ask.

  “I’m no rocket scientist,” Ray says, “but it seems to me, when your brother’s brain is using the glasses to decode a 3-D signal, he is using your DNA at the same time. But since it’s combined with his DNA, the vortex is flipping out and randomly undoing the magic. This is fun! Like a detective show on the telly!”

  Leo begins to pace. “If it happens to us, Amanda and I would be stuck in our birthday again!”

  “Not only that,” Rory says. “David’s grandfather will disappear, his dad will be sick again, and so will David one day.”

  I look at Tara, who has gone pale. Her whole life would unravel, too, not to mention all the countless other people whose lives have been touched by the vortex’s magic that I’d never even know about.

  “Okay, let’s not panic,” I tell them. “We can solve this. We’ll call Connor and David and tell them not to use the glasses again. I’ll take them and keep them safe. I’m kind of a
fraid to destroy them, just in case they’re linked to me somehow.”

  Amanda and Leo reach for their phones to make the call.

  Tara shakes her head. “It won’t work,” she says. “It’s not just the one pair now.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “It was going to be a surprise for your brother. Uncle Roger used Connor’s prototype to get fifty samples made. He copied it exactly. Exactly. Down to the chemical composition in the frames. He’s already sent out a bunch to people in the TV industry who he knows. He thinks this could be huge for home theatres, too.”

  We all stare at her as this sinks in. My DNA will be in ALL of the glasses! There will be no way to control the effect on the vortex. One by one the threads that bind this town together, that bind us together, will unfurl and break.

  “I have to shut down the vortex,” I announce.

  “You can’t,” Rory says. “You’ll lose your powers. What about your destiny?”

  “Maybe this is my destiny,” I reply. “To be the one to shut it down. This way the energy can flow somewhere else where it’s needed.”

  “But, Grace,” Amanda says, “won’t shutting it down just undo everything all at once?”

  “I … I don’t know,” I admit. “I don’t think so. But at least this gives us a chance at saving what we can. Will you help me?”

  They exchange looks, then nod.

  I turn to Leo and Ray. “Will you guys watch from outside the labyrinth and make sure nothing goes wrong? If you see me getting sucked into the vortex, rush in!”

  “You better be kidding about that last part,” Ray says. “Your parents expect you home in one piece, little lady.”

  “I’ll do my best.” I wave for the girls to follow me. Amanda runs over to Leo. I see her shove something blue into his hand. “This reminded me of your eyes,” she whispers, louder than she probably intended to. Before he can answer, she turns and joins me and Tara and Rory at the entrance of the labyrinth. I knew I would need them for something big one day, and that day is upon us.